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Conversations, and how we end them

How we feel about the duration of our conversations has rarely been studied. New research has asked people about the lengths of their conversations, and whether they end when they want them to.
  1. Elizabeth Stokoe

    1. Elizabeth Stokoe is in the School of Social Sciences and Humanities, Loughborough University, Loughborough LE11 3TU, UK.

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Conversation has been described1 as “the primordial site of human sociality”. We all have a lifetime’s experience to draw on if asked how it works, or when we reflect on the conversations we have participated in. But because conversation is something that we know tacitly how to do, scientific attempts to understand it are often relegated to the ‘soggy’ end of social psychology. Conversation certainly differs from other subjects of scientific scrutiny. For instance, black holes do not exist to be understood by people, whereas conversation exists only to be understood by people and to help us understand each other. Writing in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Mastroianni et al.2 report how they have taken up the challenge of researching conversation scientifically.

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Nature 593, 347-349 (2021)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-01074-z

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